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You will find the first of Wordsworth's series of sonnets entitled 'Personal Talk' in this geocache. We hope you enjoy reading it in the location by which it was inspired, and feel moved, as Wordsworth was, to write something of your own!
From the description of this location in William Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country:
DOVE COTTAGE.
Wordsworth came to this cottage in the last week of last century. It still remains much as it was when he entered it, although its surroundings are greatly changed. It had once been a public house, bearing the sign of a dove and olive bough. Hence the name "Dove Cottage." De Quincey — who lived in it after Wordsworth went to Rydal — thus describes it, as he saw it in the summer of 1807 : "A white cottage with two yew trees breaking the glare of its white walls." (These yew trees still stand on the eastern side of the cottage.) "A little semi-vestibule between two doors prefaced the entrance into what might be considered the principal room of the cottage. It was an oblong square, not above eight and a half feet high, sixteen feet long, and twelve broad, wainscotted from floor to ceiling with dark polished oak, slightly embellished with carving. One window there was, a perfect and unpretending cottage window, with little diamond panes, embowered at almost every season of the year with roses, and in the summer and autumn with a profusion of jasmine and other shrubs. ... I was ushered up a little flight of stairs, fourteen in all, to a little drawing-room, or whatever the reader chooses to call it. Wordsworth himself has described the fireplace of this room as his
'Half-kitchen and half-parlour fire.'
It was not fully seven feet six inches high, and in other respects pretty nearly of the same dimensions as the rustic hall below. There was however, in a small room, a library of perhaps 300 volumes, which seemed to consecrate the room as the poet's study and composing room, and which occasionally it was. But far oftener he both studied, as I found, and composed on the high-road." — Recollections of the Lakes, pp. 130, 137.
In this cottage Wordsworth, his wife, and sister received Coleridge as a frequent guest ; and the numerous references to his visits, — coming over from Keswick unexpectedly, or by invitation, — with their conversations, and doings, as recorded by Dorothy Wordsworth in her journal, are of singular interest.
There are many allusions to Dove Cottage in the poems; the majority however refer more to the orchard garden behind the house, than to the cottage itself. The four sonnets entitled Personal Talk (which were written in the house) are associated with it perhaps as intimately as any others.
To give an adequate account of the days of poetic work and high discourse within this Grasmere Cottage, the meetings with Coleridge and others, the "plain living and high thinking," of these years — 1800 to 1807 — a large part of Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal would have to be quoted. It is enough to point out here that, in Dove Cottage, and the surrounding locality — in the orchard garden, or on the roads and the heights, or the groves and valleys around, or by the banks of the Rothay — the best part of Wordsworth's work was done in these years of his "poetic prime".
Note that features of the landscape referenced in this description may have changed since the guide was first published in 1891, and new information about the poem may have come to light.
This cache is part of the series 'Through the Wordsworth Country'.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
'V ernq Gvzba bs Nguraf. Qevrq yvara. Zbyyl jrrqrq gur gheavcf, Wbua fghpx gur crnf.' Q.J. Znl 19gu 1800. Erfgvat ba n gerr fghzc haqre gur frng.